Lore

Before the world there was only the dark water, and eight powers moving in it: four frogs, four serpents. Where they met, a hill rose out of the water, the Isle of Flame. On it Kek, the darkness that knows the morning is coming, lifted the first dawn out of the dark. His pair, Kauket, lady of the night, turned it back again, and so the world began to breathe. The frog folk climbed out of that water laughing. They have been laughing at dawns ever since. It is not a joke. Or it is, and that is the point.

Eight stones for the Eight: Nu and Naunet, the waters; Heh and Hauhet, the endless; Kek and Kauket, the dark; Amun and Amaunet, the hidden. Four frogs and four serpents, standing in a ring around the place where new folk come up out of the ground, blinking. Nobody knows who first carved the glyph on the centre stone. Everyone who stood on it went east afterwards. That is the whole of the tradition, and it has never needed more.

Around the Isle of Flame the frog folk built Khemenu, the Eight-Town, and around Khemenu the free towns grew into the Republic of Kekistan: seven lands, a shrine to one of the Eight in each, and far in the eastern sands the great Temple of Kek. Ibis scribes kept its records, otters sailed its rivers, scarab caravans crossed its deserts, and the serpent-kin guarded its nights. It grew rich. It grew loud. It argued about everything, including who should tend the shrines' seals. Nobody did. The Keeper of Records notes, in the margin: 'Write that down. Somebody, please, write that down.'

Below the world lies the Coil, the serpent of unmaking. It does not hate the dawn. It simply waits at the end of every night with its mouth open, and every morning it is denied. These bones on the shore are not the Coil. They are one of its spawn, a thing that crawled up through the ice in the Long Night and was too big to crawl back. Its servants still come to pray at them: the Coilbound, who wear violet and give it their faces. When the light near you shrinks for no reason, one is close.

The seals were left untended, and one night the Coil got through. It swallowed the dawn. The sky did not lighten the next morning, or the next, or for a year of mornings. The lamps ran out of oil, then out of anything that would burn. The cold came down from the north and stayed. And then came the Hush: a silence that walked from house to house and left the people in them grey and quiet and obedient, with nothing behind their eyes. The watch on this tower kept its lamp lit for forty-one nights. This page is the forty-second.

They do not hear your footsteps. They do not hear you talk. They hear spells, and they hear laughter, and they turn their hoods toward both, slowly, every one of them at once. Whatever the Hush took out of people, it was the part that made those sounds. Do not cast near the orchard after dark. Do not laugh there at all. If a hood turns your way, walk. Do not run. Running is loud. -- written in a farmhand's hand, the last lines pressed hard into the page.

Kek met the Coil at his temple at the end of the Long Night. He could not kill it. Nobody can kill an ending. So he poured himself into stone and sat down on it, and he is sitting on it still: the great seated statue holding the sphere of the heavens. The dawn came back. His light, all of it he had left, split into seven and fled to the seven shrines, which went dark one by one as the land broke. He is not dead. He is holding something down. That takes all of a god.

When the god's light split, not all of it reached the shrines. Sparks of it fell all over the land and took shelter in strange places: in wax and old skulls, in the ribs of the dead, in the grip of drowned hands. The things that carry them are not holy for it, and most would rather you kept away. Free a spark and it does not die: it comes to you as an Ember, warm and unwilling to be traded, and wants only to go home to the Hearth. The ibis scribes have counted four thousand and six so far. They suspect they are behind.

Seven shrines are dark. Each one is lit again the same way: by Embers gathered from its land, by stone and timber and oil carried there and built, by its old guardian set free of what the Long Night made of it. When a shrine burns, its land's waystone wakes, a district of Khemenu is rebuilt, a sealed floor of the temple opens and the god has a little more of himself. When all seven burn, the doors of his temple open on the last night, and he wakes. The oath over his gate is one word long. Arise.

This fire was lit from the first dawn and has never gone out: not in the Long Night, not in the year of the cold, not in any rain since. The survivors who came back to Khemenu found it still burning in the square among the ruins, and built their lives around it. Every new citizen brings it a cinder from the grove. It is a small gift. It is meant to be. A fire that everyone feeds belongs to everyone, and so does what it will wake.

Before there was a Republic there were kings, and this was the last of them. He gave his crown to the towns and his name to a bridge, and he was buried under the orchard hill with a crown of iron for the road. The statue was raised by grateful people and pulled down in the Long Night by something heavy enough to do it. His grave was found open. The crown and the skull under it were not found at all. The Frostwell miners, before they went quiet, wrote of a crowned thing singing in the deep ice.